


We'll Always Have San Tristen

by Domimagetrix



Series: Gentili e Sculacciati [6]
Category: Runescape (Video Games)
Genre: AU - 1940s, Adult Language, Brief Making of Out, F/M, Gunshot and Gun-Related Threat, Mobsters, Multi, Organized Crime, Unsubtle Design Criticism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-17
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-10-30 11:54:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17828066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Domimagetrix/pseuds/Domimagetrix
Summary: Sometimes it's necessary to orchestrate a bit more cross-dimensional fuckery. Sometimes the heart demands it.





	We'll Always Have San Tristen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Phritzie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phritzie/gifts).



A horsehair brush smoothed across brass, cymbal responding to the contact with a gigolo’s solicitous exhale.

The Gray Ring was mostly empty. Two of the chandeliers had been extinguished and the third dimmed, the harsh glow gone, chrome-lined details blended with an artist’s consistent hand from sharp glare to candle-kissed. The band remained onstage despite the hour, testing the drums and coaxing rich sounds from the bass.

_Almost. Something’s missing._

He’d asked for jazz. The band knew a little, and a generous handful of dollars had, with the kind of magic cast only with the coin of the realm, expanded their repertoire with the suddenness of a coquettish fan snapping open. Any music could speak, but jazz was a _conversation,_ one imbued with clever turns of phrase and all the double-entendres one could ask for.

It would be his luck she’d take to big band or hate music altogether and spite him, given what he remembered of his luck with her in other worlds, but somehow that energy felt wrong. He needed seductive. He needed to be engaged on fifteen different levels, minimum.

_I’m forgetting something._

Ivories quoted Cole, and the percussionist settled into a smooth _one two-three, one two-three,_ the bassist falling into casual compliment with the pianist.

_Something._ He eyed the roses and dormant candles decorating tables around the dance floor. _Do the thing right._

Anticipation accompanied him as he went around lighting one candle for every three or four, trying to focus on the music’s mood in lieu of mounting worries, less successful with each sharp drag of a match over grainy paper. The last one saw two matches wasted, and he decided enough little teardrops of background lighting existed to suit his purpose.

_Think this through._

He alone knew not every version of Gielinor had made its intrusion here. Some remained behind, either adapting to the Earth shard playing substitute or preserved separately from it. She hadn’t been among the World Guardians brought to San Tristen and its outlying territories.

He’d hoped. Waited. Searched, employing both his own considerable resources and a few native private detectives toward the task, but there hadn’t been so much as a whisper. He’d be lying if he said another anchor - another divergent - wouldn’t be useful.

And he’d be lying if he said that was the full of his investment there.

_Won’t roll snake eyes in a tux. Black goes with everything._

It’d drained him, pushing the Needle as he had, but it would be worth it. It’d been a long trek up a tower’s spiral staircase in his head, passing rooms which echoed the dead laughter of ghosts refusing to acknowledge their departure from the living. Memories. The linchpin of all worlds had bent him cruelly for this boon.

_Paint a diagram on the floor? Or is she going to teach me a new number? With our luck, we’ll wind up tangled on the carpet trying to foxtrot._

Only an hour. The mini-Shift would revert after that, but for an hour, she’d be here. She wouldn’t remember. It’d be as though she’d always been here.

_I’ll know. But it’s my face this time._

Only for a little while. The onus was on him to make it worth that while.

_It can be right. Here, for an hour. Maybe more if everything goes according to plan and I can bring you back._

“Damn, don’t forget to leave one in the window.”

Sliske looked up at the woman who’d joined the band onstage, irritated yet grateful for the distraction. “Too much?”

She smoothed a hand down the side of her dress, its light turquoise sequins glittering their response to the candles’ call, and cast a critical eye over a piece of paper held in her right hand. She answered him in a Louisiana pour of molten sugar. _“Hail_ yeah. You better hope your target ain’t got a lick of class or they’re gonna make dust right out that door.”

“Is that what she’ll do? Scurry off because I lit too many candles?”

She let her paper hand fall to her side and made a weary sound. “Nah, honey. She’s gonna run when she sees that look on your face.”

“I have the means.” He gestured toward his chin. He’d hoped to avoid doing that again, but...

“Not that, god _damn!”_ She waved the paper at him. “Not _how_ you look, cement-skin, the look you _got_ on that face.”

_Cement-skin._ That was new, and so was she. “Rhanni Mauchisse, aren’t you? You and Wenu are the new hires.”

Her lips pressed together in a thin line. “Mhm. And flippin’ the table don’t get you nothin’ but an upside-down table.” One of her nails _tap-tapped_ on the paper she held. “Only two kinds of people ask for this jazz. People playin’ at love tryin’ to get laid, or people who done and got their stupid self in the real thing.”

_Shift is five minutes away, and someone’s already dragging my laundry out for the alley cats’ inspection. Grand._

Ranni seemed to lose interest in him, wrestling with the microphone stand. The microphone itself resembled Zaros’s symbol by coincidence, something that always struck him in equal measure discordant and satisfying.

Memories bubbled to the surface in his mind, Felix-memories, despite the complex feelings brought on by seeing the Empire’s emblem in sound equipment.

Chunks of some purple tuber falling into a pot. Papers tacked onto every convenient surface around him, notes and mysteries begging his curiosity. Her face in profile, giving every indication he was being ignored, thoughts to which he wasn’t privy tucked safely away for her to reveal or retain at whim. That same face lost in ecstasy, wrestling with the prospect of it, irritated in the case of the latter. A face that’d also tricked him as thoroughly as he’d tricked anyone - as often as she’d truly been lost in it with him, she’d been scheming revenge. He was as likely to be rewarded for applying his tongue to a situation as he was to pay for it, word or deed.

Sliske pinched the knot in his tie and wriggled it center. Wondered.

_Everyone who comes to me has the strangest relationship with life._

And then there was Felix.

Though much had turned out differently than he’d expected in other Gielinor-lives, everything from the word “go” had been a study in unsteadiness with her in that particular life.

_Lives. Frittered there, too._

Sliske adjusted his incline against the table. Pointless, but he was always a cat shy the whiskers on half his face with her. She led most of their dance.

He stared at one palmette on the carpet, then another. Imagination connected a few to each other in the rough shape of a foot. Then again. He began to rethink the dance diagram, then stopped as the foot-shapes abandoned the speculative.

A shoe faced the wrong way. No buffed sheen, no polish, but its black surface almost glittered with shop-shelf newness. A pant cuff - hemmed well if not professionally - hid half of it.

The pant leg rose to a jacket-covered hip, said jacket opened to a light gray, button-up shirt. No tie, but the buttons were pearlescent in the way of natural seashell interiors. Either mother-of-pearl or a very good facsimile.

Her hair had seen the efforts of a side-undercurl as well as the abandonment of those efforts. The result hung beneath the gray gambler on her head. She looked as though she’d started the day styled, then progressed right into a scuffle that’d left clothes and hair charmingly untamed.

Felix waved her revolver at him. “You’re in my bar.”

Sliske didn’t reach for the stars, but held his hands open to either side of himself. “Actually, this is the dance floor.” He gestured with amusement toward the little recess near the entryway to upstairs, its rear wall lined with liquor bottles. “That’s the bar.”

Her mouth opened in a willful expression, tongue pressing behind her teeth. “And they let the wiseguy comedian greet the customers.” The barrel moved again. “Sit. Start talking.”

He slid a chair out and sat, leaving his hands within view otherwise, and watched her drag a chair free to sit opposite him.

A candle’s flame wavered between them.

Sliske could help himself but to smile.

_I missed you, Sweetheart._

  
  


_………._

  
  


Ranni watched them, relying on memory for the words as she sang.

_“I love you for sentimental reasons_   
_I hope you do believe me_  
 _I'll give you my heart…”_

She watched the woman lean forward and gesture again with her gun.

_Ain’t enough jazz to fix what’s wrong with you two, mm-mm, nossir and no ma’am. Don’t negotiate shit about a relationship with a gun._

She was too close to the instruments, too far away from them to hear.

Cement-Face leaned, in, a hand curled under his jaw. Demon eyes never even wavered toward the gun.

_Hope you’re lead-proof, moron._

  
  


………

  
  


The shot rang out and startled the musicians, who watched the comedy and tragedy masks fall from the wall and clatter on the ground. They picked up the tune after it seemed enough bullet-free moments had passed.  
  
“It had to go.”

“You make a compelling argument.”

She grumbled. “You turned this place into a hideous disaster. A casino? That’s what you saw for it when you barged into that bank and demanded they hand it over to you?”

“Listed by the bank. You can’t fault me leaping on a deal like this. Location alone-”  
  
“-Is why I chose this place to begin with.” Felix sat up, feeling the weight of the revolver grow heaver. She leaned back and rested her forearm on the table, keeping it trained on him. “Me. My bar, my place of business.”

He lifted the hand not under his chin palm-up in a contriteness-bereft shrug. “Lease indicates otherwise.”

_This motherfucker…_ “Bank was closed on the due date or it wouldn’t have been listed at all!”

The smug bastard smiled. “Did I do such a terrible job with it, Sweetheart?”

It should’ve struck badly. People doled out endearments in the cascade of their dismissal all the time. She hated it.

Normally, she hated it.

It didn’t grate. Not entirely. But it brought with it a whisper, not in the voice of the wholly bizarre, nearly insufferable card in front of her.

Not his whisper. Hers.

_“I don’t think I could forget your name either.”_

An s-word. A name. The bank had refused to provide it, and she hadn’t had time to ask around.

Didn’t matter. She knew.

“Sliske.”

More of that unlikely pleasure in his tone. “Yes?”

Felix jabbed a finger at him with her free hand, clinging to anything with the potential to free her of the odd not-quite-a-memory. “It smells like chlorine out there by the back wall. Where _my_ bar was.”

Sliske nodded. “I’m due for a bombing in a few hours. The smell’s unfortunate, and the loss of that wall will be, too.” He sat back and extended a hand out to her. “Would you grace me with a dance?”

  
  


……….

  
  


They danced well together. Rhanni had expected awkwardness - Cement-Skin was too tall and the formerly gun-wielding woman was the only one between the two of them to stand at reasonable height - but the boss’s steps were careful. The woman with him seemed to match move for move, disparity or no.

It was the goddamnedest thing Rhanni had ever seen.

She sang and watched them revolve in the kind of slow dance people untrained in classic styles did. There was a stiffness about the woman at first, but - as one song bled into the next with a ruffle of the brush over a cymbal and gentle change of tune - so, too, did that stiffness fade from her shoulders.

Rhanni lost and caught a word as alien hunkered down, reached, grabbed the woman by the backs of the thighs, and hefted her up, leaning back against a table. She didn’t punch him as Rhanni expected, but almost molded to him, speaking against one of the hard-looking protrusions on the boss’s chin.

_I’ll be damned. He did it. The absolute fool ain’t dead._

She was relieved. For them, and for her paycheck.

Dead men didn’t write paychecks.

  
  


……….

  
  


Felix remembered him and didn’t, it seemed. But there was enough.

There was enough for the kiss. For her to cling to him like a second skin, for her to murmur words in his ear. Warm words, warm breath, the offer of working together interrupted by need and want.

Same as it always was. And that, Sliske found, was quite fine.

But time slipped without a clock to watch. He felt her weight fade.

He kept his eyes closed.

She was gone.

Sliske opened his eyes and stood back up, taking his - and only his - weight off the table. He looked at the stage, and at the songstress who’d been entertaining a nearly empty casino for the last hour.

She flicked something on the side of the microphone and sighed. “Sorry your girl didn’t show up, Cement-Skin. Maybe next time.”

He nodded. “Perhaps next time.”

He looked up and off to the side, toward the wall in which the bar was housed.

The bullet hole was still there. The masks lay on the floor beneath, broken. A glance at their table revealed the gun hadn’t left as Felix had.

He gestured toward the wall. “Were you here for that?”

Rhanni looked over to where he gestured and shrugged, working the microphone stand back down, an indelicate little grunt of effort preceding her words. “Nah. Figured it must’ve been somethin’ went down before we got here.” She stopped her efforts and looked at him. “Need me to keep it under my hat if the law shows up?”

Sliske shook his head, feeling a smile tug at the corners of his mouth. “Don’t worry about it.”

He looked again at the bullet hole, letting the smile form in full. “Definitely next time.”

**Author's Note:**

> This thing has been half-brewed in my mind forever and a day. I fucking ***LOVE*** WG Felix, and imagining her in the frame of Gentili e Sculacciati is just. Fucking. Like there are so many ways that could work. And Phritzie was kind enough to let me go on this little one-shot journey to explore one of those possibilities.
> 
> No idea if this is way off the mark but. Just. SO MUCH FUCKING FUN and Phritzie thank you so much for letting me do this thing that exists right here. Hopefully it's at least partially as much fun as it was to write.
> 
> And to everyone who hasn't yet feasted eyes upon the incomparable WG Felix and all the glorious writing to come about, I HIGHLY urge-recommend getting a tall glass of your favorite beverage and immersing in Phritzie's writing, RS-'verse and the modern one and just all of it. Is amazing. You will not regret.


End file.
